Variable subject pronoun expression in Cabo-Verdean Creole

Some language-internal constraints

Datos Bibliográficos

ID14860239
AutoresAdrián Rodríguez-Riccelli (0000-0003-2209-2084, University at Buffalo (SUNY), autor de correspondencia)
Año2021
Volumen36
Número1
Páginas109-174
Fecha de publicación2021-03-25
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of Pidgin and Creole Languages (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0920-9034 • E-ISSN: 1569-9870
EditorialJohn Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1075/jpcl.00071.rod
OpenAlexW3112246602
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas1
Referencias citadas95

The Cabo-Verdean Creole (CVC) subject domain has clitic and tonic pronouns that often amalgamate in double subject pronoun constructions; the possibility of a zero-subject and the formal category underlying subject clitics are disputed ( Baptista 1995 , 2002 ; Pratas 2004 ). This article discusses five variable constraints that condition subject expression across three descriptive and inferential analyses of a corpus of speech collected from 33 speakers from Santiago and Maio. Double subject pronoun constructions and zero-subjects were promoted by a persistence effect, though for the former this applied across nonadjacent clauses since double subject pronoun constructions are switch reference and contrastive devices resembling the doubling of agreement suffixes by independent pronouns in languages traditionally classified as pro- drop. Zero-subjects were favored in third-person contexts as previously observed by Baptista and Bayer (2013) , and when a semantically referentially deficient ( Duarte & Soares da Silva 2016 ) DP antecedent was in an Intonational Unit that was prosodically and syntactically linked to the Intonational Unit containing the target anaphor ( Torres Cacoullos & Travis 2019 ). Results support reclassification of CVC subject clitics as ambiguous person agreement markers ( Siewierska 2004 ) and suggest that CVC is developing a split-paradigm for person marking and subject expression ( Wratil 2009 ; Baptista & Bayer 2013 )

Expression (computer science · Linguistics · Object pronoun · Personal pronoun · Pronoun · Reflexive pronoun · Subject (documents · Subject pronoun · Computer Science · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Multilingual Education and Policy · Philosophy · Psychology · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation